Comment by khoitsma

I dunno, but it does seem a time honored tradition

https://goomics.net/106

Maybe because buildings are easy to describe the surface concepts to people without deep understanding of civil engineering or architecture or whatever, compared to other engineering disciplined like mech or chem or electrical.

Everyone knows what a building foundation is and why it's important, but if someone starts talking to you about negative roots being necessary for a stable linear time-invariant system, most people's eyes are going to glaze over.